Of Sea and Sand

boys began to point and tease, as their parents became suspicious, looking toward him and shouting back at one another, no doubt about why he might be standing there, in the full heat, watching his own front door. They didn’t know him well enough to allow this loitering, and even with a good grasp of Arabic, he would have struggled to explain it, so he gave up. His vision was blurring, his head throbbing, and he couldn’t afford to fall foul of his neighbors, so he crossed back to his house, glancing through the window as he reached the door. Prudence was no longer in the front room, as she had been when he’d left.

He opened the door; she was lying on her side on the bench, leafing through the National Geographic.

Gabriel couldn’t move. He could neither step forward nor back, because that would have meant quitting this spot, this certainty. He didn’t wish to leave the realm in which she existed in simple terms.

And yet, dizzy with apprehension, he forced himself to step outside again and leaned into the window until his nose touched the pane, straining against the reflected glare of the white building behind him.

Prudence was not in the room.

He swung back to the open door: she was lying there reading.

Again and again he moved from the door, where he could see her, to the window, where he could not. He strained against the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes, shutting out all other light, and could see the bench, with its cover creased from their earlier fumbling and his empty mug on the white stone shelf. No one. Nothing.

Back to the doorway.

There.

Gone.

There.

Gone.

They had left the realm of the explicable.

Officially spooked, Gabriel became fretful, watchful, and tensed whenever Prudence came into sight. With his senses on high alert, he became more focused. She had no odor; at night, she lay as still as a stone, her breath so quiet he had to lean over to make sure she was alive. He heard things, in the house and out of it. Those waves crashing against rocks. Heavy waves, ocean waves. Memory. Had to be. These were sounds streaming from his childhood days on the Irish coast. Could Prudence also be coming at him from behind—an acquaintance back along the way whom he no longer recognized? Memory made flesh. A gentle reminder. Had he retreated into some comfortable pocket of his own mind where he stored happier times? This, he knew, was what most concerned Annie—that the delusion was entirely of his own creation, for his protection from his misdeeds.

Because although that rumbling ocean was distant, he could have sworn it was getting louder.

Reason was sitting on the edge of his control, as if waiting for a chance to leap beyond his grasp. Where there is no logic, reason falters. He woke one night, hot. A strange kind of heat covering him, neither clammy—he wasn’t sweating—nor dry, more like lying in the direct path of a beam, as under a sunlamp or the sun. The heat of the sun—yes. All over him, though the room was as dark as Hades.

Alarmed, he sat up. The heat vanished. He reached for water, trembling, but the glass was empty, and he longed for those other dark nights when Max’s hunched figure and limp fingers haunted him. That he could explain. He could unclench it. But what kind of dreams were these—the weight of a purring cat and dark heat burning him—and what had they to do with Prudence?

More sounds came, filtering through his attempts to keep them out. Alert in the course of another unquiet night, he heard someone coming along the corridor—a woman—nylons rubbing together. He leaped from the bed, again, and stood naked halfway across the room, his panting breaking the silence. Heart thundering, he turned on the landing light, fearful of confronting some woman with large thighs, but no one stood on the whitewashed landing, even though he could not have dreamed it, since he had not been asleep, and when he turned, Prudence was no longer in the bed.

The lady in the stockings had taken her away.

In the broad light of morning—and this place was very bright—Gabriel rationalized. He wanted Annie to come but didn’t want to scare her more than he already had, and there was no one else to talk to, except Prudence, who was rather short on commentary and opinion. She was not unintelligent. There was more to her than flesh—he could see it, behind her eyes, a life of some sort, hurt, pain, even wisdom. But all she needed from him, it seemed, was to be physically close. And water. The glass of water he left on the bedside table at night was always empty in the morning, whether he had seen her or not, and he found empty glasses all over the house, which he had not put there. This was a thirsty phantasm.

Prudence was dream and nightmare entwined. No way to reject the ecstasy, no way of escaping the fear. All in, it was beginning to cost him.

“What kind of family do you hail from?”

Prudence didn’t reply.

“Don’t want to talk about it?”

Still nothing.

“Nah, me neither. I never mention the parents, if I can help it. Don’t think about them either. If I did, I’d see them. I’d see them as they were when I left. Did I tell you about that? About the day I left?” He dipped his chin toward the head on his shoulder. Her fingers were dallying on his chest, her eyelids lowered, but she showed no inclination to respond. “Not much to tell, as it happens,” he went on. “I went into the living room, said, ‘Bye, I’m off to Muscat,’ and Dad didn’t even look up from the newspaper. Thin. Got very thin, he had, like my sister. Mam, though, she came to the door and wished me Godspeed, her face hollow. Dead inside. It could be her fault. Parents blame themselves for everything,